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Thomas Wentworth Higginson 



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BY 



EDWIN D. MEAD 



Reprinted from the Editor's Table of the 

1Rcw jEuQlanC) /IDagaslne 

For February 1 900 



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THOMAS WENTWORTH HICGINSON. 

By Edwin D. Mead. JS^ 

Rcpriiitcil fiDin the Editor's Table i)f the N'kw 1v\(;i.a\1) Maiia/.ink, Fehruaiv, 1900. 



AT the dinner of the American His- 
torical Association, at the Hotel 
Brunswick, during the recent con- 
vention of the Association in Boston, 
the principal speaker was Colonel T. 
W. Hig-g-inson ; and in the course of 
his speech he said one thing which is 
likely to be remembered longer, as it 
is certainly deserving of being re- 
membered longer, than any other 
word spoken during that convention " 
week. This we say remembering 
that the week was a most interesting 
one and rhat many valuable words 
were spoken. 

"I have been specially struck." said 
Colonel Higg'inson, "by the force and clear- 
ness of the speeches made in these meet- 
ings. But I noticed the absence of one 
word which in my student days was al- 
ways present, always in the air — the word 
'freedom.' In this morning's discussion 
of the relation of this country to other 
countries that glorious word did not oc- 
cur. I pray you, ladies and gentlemen, m 
your historical study and teachings* tb ' 
think deeply of this, and consider ho\v tour 
names express the situation, Caesar and 
Napoleon on one side and Japan and 
^lexico on the other. All your dreams 
of empire point back to the desolate plains 
of the Canipagna, the end of Roman great- 
ness, or to the desolate rocks of St. Helena. 
Wc might have seized Japan at one time; 
but look at her, and compare her free 
vigor with India under British rule. Look 
at Mexico, which we might also have 
seized, when she was the very example of 
misrule. Now see how she is, by merely 
being let alone, growing up into power and 
prosperity. I dare say that three-fourths 
of you disagree with me on this point; but 
I have stood in companies where nine- 
tenths of those present were on the other 
side, and I can stand it. But I hope the 
next time I attend meetings of this asso- 
ciation I shall hear something about free- 
dom, in the deliberations." 

The references to Alexico and 
Japan in this passage are echoes of 
words of Colonel Higginson's in an 
article printed last summer, which are 
worth reviving, as they state more 
fully the leading thought of the 
speech which we quote: 



"Twice in history has the North Ameri- 
can republic won just gratitude from the 
human race when it might have forfeiiod 
it by a policy less advanced. To this day. 
lo be sure, Mr. Cecil Rhodes, engaged in 
his career of empire-making, has never 
ceased to blame this nation for letting 
Mexico go, when she lay conquered in our 
hands — for taking down that flag which 
once waved in 'the halls of the Montezu 
mas,' and contenting ourselves with a slice 
of territory when we might have plundered 
the whole. But the world has judged dif- 
ferently. ]\Iore striking still is the case of 
Japan. There is in the public park at New- 
port, R. I., the statue of a naval hero whose 
greatness lay not merely in what he did, 
but in what he abstained from doing; so 
that, having for the first time opened Japan 
to modern civilization. Commodore Perry 
left it to work out its own destiny and be- 
come one of the great free nations of the 
world. Can any one doubt that Mexico 
and Japan are now far higher in condition 
than if they had been reduced to subject 
or tributary states, as Clive and Hastings 
reduced British India? There is no proof 
that the Japanese are intrinsically superior 
to the Hindoos; but the one race was left 
free by the Americans, and the other sub- 
jugated by Englishmen. So there is no 
proof that the Filipinos are not, as x\dmiral 
Dewey said, as well fitted for freedom as 
the Cubans, or, one may add, as the Mexi- 
cans. Our nation has never needed to 
vindicate its power of fighting. In two in- 
stances, Japan and Mexico, it has also 
proved its power of self-control. Can it 
be possible that we shall fail to exercise 
the same self-control in dealing with the 
Filipinos? If we succeed, if we trust the 
principle of liberty, we ftiay see them stand 
where the Japanese stand; if we pursue the 
policy of conquest, they can never rise above 
the humbler condition of the Hindoos. 
There appears to be no human being for 
whom the British government has less use 
than for an educated Hindoo." 



The article from which this latter 
passage is taken bore as a title that 
stirring exclamation of Thomas 
Paine's, "Where liberty is not, there 
is my country!" emphasizing his fel- 
low-citizenship with every man who 
was oppressed and neseded a helping 
hand. It was inevitable that Colonel 
Higginson should be a leader among 



-y 



THOMA s 1 1 :bx TU 'ORTH higginson 



those who condeum the course so 
hostile to freedom and the world's 
progress, into which the republic has 
jjeen betrayed in the last year. It 
would be useful to make his words 
a text for a discourse upon that 
theme. It is not upon the question of 
the Philippines, however, that we 
here wish to write, nor upon Japan, 
nor Mexico, but upon Colonel Hig- 
ginson himself and his lifelong ser- 
vices for freedom, to which his strong- 
position in the present crisis forms 
simply the logical and fitting climax. 



He gave to us a year or more ago 
that most noble, frank and fascinating 
of autobiographies, "Cheerful Yester- 
days" ; and now, just as he asks us to 
see to it that we do not omit the word 
"freedom" from our political vocabu- 
lary, there comes to us his new book, 
"Contemporaries," which may prop- 
erly enough be considered a second 
volume of the autobiography. The 
books are necessary companions, each 
supplementing the other. In his 
"Yesterdays," Colonel Higginson pic- 
tures the scenes and the events in 
which he and his strong contempo- 
raries acted together; in his "Con- 
temporaries," he paints the portraits 
of the noble men and women who 
helped to make his yesterdays brave 
and great and therefore in the noblest 
sense cheerful. The two books to- 
gether give us a survey, not surpassed 
in insight and value by any other, of 
the intellectual and moral life of New 
England and America during the last 
two generations. They remind us of 
the high credentials of this brave 
spokesman for freedom, by bringing 
before us as they do the harder and 
more trying times when just as calmly 
and as firmly he "stood in companies 
where nine-tenths of those present 
were on the other side." They also 
serve — and we confess that this has 
been to us their greatest service — to 
make us think anew of the immense 
service, both as a man of letters and a 
man of action, which Colonel Hig- 
ginson has rendered America. We 



have been led to turn anew, and with 
a more definite and comprehensive 
purpose, to the long line of his books 
which stands upon the shelves of the 
library, to consider the great variety 
and extent of his writings, their liter- 
ary charm and their significant con- 
tribution to American culture, and 
the central aims and principles which 
inform and inspire them. 

* * 

The mere extent of Colonel Hig- 
ginson's writings, when their serious 
and thorough nature is considered, 
is impressive. Before the title-page 
of "Contemporaries," the publishers, 
Messrs. Houghton, Mif^in & Com- 
pany, print the list of Colonel Higgin- 
son's books published by them.selves : 
;ind the list includes, besides 'Con- 
temporaries" and "Cheerful Yester- 
days," the following: "Atlantic Es- 
says," "Common Sense about 
Women," "Army Life in a Black 
Regiment," "The New World and 
the New Book," "Travellers and Out- 
laws," "Malbone," "Oldport Days," 
"Outdoor Papers," "The Procession 
of the Flowers," "The Afternoon 
Landscape," "The Monarch of 
Dreams," and "Margaret Fuller 
Ossoli." But this dozen and more 
volimies do not by any means make 
up the whole, although we have here 
his best works. A dozen more vol- 
umes must be added to complete the 
list which tells the story of his literary 
labors. There are the three little col- 
lections of miscellaneous essays, 
"Women and Men," "Concerning All 
of Us," and "Book and Heart" ; there 
is the second little volume of poems, 
"Such as They Are," containing 
poems by Mrs. Higginson also ; there 
are the "Tales of the Enchanted 
Islands of the Atlantic" and the 
"Book of American Explorers" for 
the young people. For Colonel Hig- 
ginson has always had a hand for the 
service of the young people. Almost 
his first published book (1850) was 
"The Birthday in Fairy Land," a 
story for children; and when, near a 
t]uarter of a century ago, he published 



THOMAS WESTWOKTIl IIICl.IXSON. 



his "Young Folks' History of the 
United States," he did one of the 
greatest services ever done for our 
American boys and girls, not only in 
giving them a history of their own 
country which still remains one of the 
best, but in provoking a dozen more 
of our best writers to work in the same 
field in a similar way. His "Larger 
History of the United States" has, like 
the smaller one, the supreme quality 
of bemg interesting. In the field of 
histor}^ we have besides the two stout 
volumes on "Massachusetts in the 
Army and Navy during the Civil 
War" and the volume of "English 
History for American Readers," pre- 
pared in collaboration with Professor 
Edward Channing. He was the ed- 
itor of the "Harvard Memorial Biog- 
raphies," the collection of lives of 
Harvard men who fell in the Civil 
\^'ar, and himself the writer of not a 
few of the biographies in the work. 
His services as an editor have been 
frequent and considerable. In this 
capacity he gave us the four volumes 
of "Brief Biographies of European 
Public Men." With Samuel Long- 
fellow he compiled "Thalatta," that 
charming book for the seaside ; with 
Mrs. Bigelow, he compiled the val- 
uable volume of "American Son- 
nets" : with Mrs. Todd, he edited the 
Poems of Emily Dickinson. He has 
translated the works of Epictetus. 
There is the useful little volume of 
"Hints on Writing and Speech-mak- 
ing" ; and we shall surely have soon a 
volume on the Orators of America, 
made up of the lectures recently given 
at the Lowell Institute. There is the 
volume of "Short Studies of American 
Authors," — Hawthorne, Poe, Tho- 
reau, Howells, Helen Plunt, Henry 
James, — which may almost be viewed 
as another volume of "Contempo- 
raries." The same may be said of the 
recent volume on "Old Cambridge." 
The first of the five chapters in the 
book is an antiquarian chapter ; but 
the "Three Literary Epochs" of the 
second chapter — namely, the epoch of 
the North American Review, that of 
the Dial, and that of the Atlantic 



Monthly — were epochs all in some 
manner familiar to him, and a part of 
which he was ; while the last three 
chapters, on Plolmes, Longfellow and 
Lowell, might just as well have found 
place in "Contemporaries." 






Born in Cambridge, in 1823, Ilig- 
ginson has been emphatically a Cam- 
bridge man ; just as Edward Everett 
Hale, whom we honor together with 
him, — our two great representatives 
of the great generation, — born in 
Boston the year before, has been em- 
phatically a Boston man. Both men 
preached for a time in Worcester. 
Before going to Worcester, Higgin- 
son lived for some years in Newbury- 
port, part of the time preaching there; 
and for many years he lived in New- 
port. But we regard these flights as 
digressions. It is a little hard to 
think of him as really at home in any 
of these places or anywhere outside of 
Cambridge, where he was born. 
More than any other of our literary 
men, save Lowell alone, — more than 
Longfellow, more than Holmes, who, 
although born in Cambridge, is al- 
ways to our thought as much a Bos- 
ton man as Dr. Hale, — is Higginson 
identified with Cambridge. "To 
James Russell Lowell, Schoolmate 
and Fellow-Townsman," he dedicated 
his little volume of poems, "The Af- 
ternoon T>andscape." Lowell, his 
Cambridge fellow and co-celebrant, 
was four years the older, born in 
1 819, — the same year, it is interesting 
to observe, as Julia Ward Howe, our 
third great veteran, whose "Reminis- 
cences," traversing so much of the 
same ground and touching so many 
of the same men and women, come to 
us just as we are reading "Cheerful 
Yesterdays" and "Contemporaries." 

Higginson was fittingly the orator 
on the occasion of the celebration of 
the 250th anniversary of the founding 
of Cambridge,, in 1881 ; as Lowell was 
the orator, five years later, at the cele- 
bration of the 250th anniversary of 
the founding of Harvard College. 
We have somewhere Lowell's letter 



THOMAS IVEXTWORTH HIGGINSOX. 



to Hig-g;inson. tcllino- o{ the satisfac- 
tion and delii^lit with which he had 
read in London the hitter's Cam- 
Ijridoe oration. There is much about 
Lowell scattered throuohout Hio-o-in- 
son's books; but somehow we confess 
that it all seems inadequate. Perhaps 
it is because we naturally expect so 
much and desire sci nmch. where 
there was such rare opportunity for 
knowing^. Criticism seems too fre- 
quent, and emphasis upon Lowell's 
g-reat sides insufBcient. The special 
essay upon Lowell is one of the 
slig-htest and most disappointing- of 
all the many which Higginson de- 
votes to his contemporaries, althoug-h 
it is redeemed in great measure by its 
last page, which is one of the finest 
tributes to Lowell ever written. 

To the useful volume, by various 
hands, upon "Cambridge in 1896." 
Higginson contributed tlie chapter on 
"Life in Cambridge Tov.'n," a chapter 
suggesting Lowell's old essay (writ- 
ten in 1854) upon "Cambridge 
Thirty Years Ago." Referring to 
this delightful essay, Lligginson re- 
minds us, in his essay upon John 
Holmes, in "Contemporaries," that it 
must be supplemented by John 
Holmes's "Harvard Square," in the 
Harvard Book, if we would get "the 
very inmost glimpse of village life in 
the earlier Cambridge." The glimpses 
of Cambridge life generally with 
wliich this essay on John Holmes 
abounds constitute one of its greatest 
charms. Many more pages in the life 
of Margaret Fuller than those which 
make up the chapter on "Girlhood at 
Cambridge" are valuable contribu- 
tions to the history of Cambridge in- 
tellectual and social life in the first 
half of the century. The opening- 
chapters of "Cheerful Yesterdays," 
those upon "A Cambridge Boyhood" 
and "A Child of the College" are 
Cambridge and Harvard pictures of 
rare interest and of distinct historical 
value. 

Higginson has been a most loyal 
and loving son of Harvard; and the 
l^niversity honored herself as much as 
she honored him when she conferred 



upon him last summer her highest de- 
gree. We have referred to the "Har- 
vard Memorial Biographies," which 
he edited. In enumerating his w^rit- 
ings we must not forget, in this con- 
nection, his contribution to the Har- 
vard Book, nor his "Memorials of the 
Class of 1833." We must not forget 
liis contributions to the "IMemorial 
History of Boston," to the publica- 
tions of the Massachusetts Historical 
Society, the Browning Society, the 
Free Religious Association. He was 
appropriately the orator at the cen- 
tennial celebration of the Massachu- 
setts Historical Society in 1891 ; for 
he has been one of our most zeal- 
ous and faithful historical scholars. 
vSaid the president of the Historical 
Society in introducing him on this 
centennial occasion: "He has filled 
the Puritan ideal of a citizen's range 
of office, — elder, reformer, military 
commander, historian, deputy to the 
Great and General Court." He 
has been for years the president of 
the Free Religious Association. His 
popular tract on "The Sympathy of 
Religions" is a good index to the 
radicalism and catholicity of his own 
religion. The published sermons that 
, have come down to us in the libraries, 
with such titles as "Man Shall not 
Live by Bread Alone," "Elegy with- 
out Fiction" (in 1852, with reference 
to Webster and Rantoul), "Scripture 
Idolatry," and "Massachusetts in 
Mourning" (1854), show that while he 
was in the pulpit he must have been a 
preacher after Theodore Parker's own 
lieart. 



Of peculiar interest and value 
among Colonel Higginson's books is 
his little Life of Francis Higginson, 
the first minister in the Massachusetts 
Bay Colony — coming to Salem in 
1629 — and Colonel Higginson's own 
first American ancestor. It is a lov- 
ing study of English life in the early 
Puritan time, of the customs of Cam- 
bridge LTniversity in that seventeenth 
century, of the earliest ecclesiastical 
usages in New England, of Francis 



THOMAS WENTVVORTH HICG/XSOX. 



Higginson's own noteworthy contri- 
butions to the picture and record of 
the place and time, and above all of 
that saintly man's life and character. 
With proper pride may Colonel Hig- 
ginson look back to such an ancestor ; 
and with proper pride may he claim at 
the close of his study: "The stock has 
surely shown some vitality and vigor, 
and perhaps something of transmitted 
public spirit and of interest in things 
higher than those which are merely 
material. These descendants have re- 
mained loyal, as Americans, to the 
verdict of their early progenitor, that 
'one sup of New England air is bet- 
ter than a whole flagon of old English 
ale' ; and many of them have shown 
in their lives an adherence to John 
Higginson's opinion, 'that if any man 
amongst us make religion as twelve 
and the world as thirteen, let such an 
one know he hath neither the spirit of 
a true New England man, nor yet of a 
sincere Christian.' " The justice of the 
claim is the more apparent when it is 
remembered that the vitality and 
vigor of the stock have been repre- 
sented in our day by such men, in ad- 
dition to Colonel Higginson himself, 
as General Sherman and Senator 
Sherman, Governor Andrew% Senator 
Evarts and Senator Hoar. 

To old Salem, the home of Francis 
Higginson, Colonel Higginson re- 
turns more than once in his books. 
The essay on "Old Salem Sea-Cap- 
tains" is one of the best in the volume, 
"Travellers and Outlaws," which is 
made up of studies of some of those 
unfamiliar and curious historical 
episodes and characters with which 
Colonel Higginson delights to deal. 
The historian is ever and again com- 
ing to the front in these many volumes 
of essays. "A Charge with Prince 
Rupert," one of the best of the "At- 
lantic Essays," brings out the motives 
and the spirit of the two conflicting 
parties in the English Civil War with 
singular vividness and force. The es- 
say on "The Puritan Minister." in the 
same volume, is a study of the early 
ecclesiastical life of New England of 
hisfh historical value. 



To Newport, which certainly was 
his home for many years, although 
it is hard to identify him with it. — 
just as it is hard to think of Haw- 
thorne as a part of Concord in the 
same way that we think him a part of 
Salem, — Colonel Higginson has gen- 
erously paid his debt; as Hawthorne 
so well paid his debt to Concord. The 
"Mosses from an Old Manse" is not 
a better offering upon the Concord 
altar than "Oldport Days" upon the 
Newport altar; and Colonel Higgin- 
son himself, who loves Hawthorne so 
well, would say that that is the best 
that could be said of his book. In 
truth it may be said that, of all Col- 
onel Higginson's books, "Oldport 
Days," with those fascinating chap- 
ters upon Oldport Wharves, the 
Haunted Window, a Driftwood Fire, 
and the rest, is the most Hawthorn- 
ish ; and it has given the spirit of the 
real Newport, as opposed to the New- 
port of mere sojourn and fashion, its 
best literary expression. "Malbone," 
it will be remembered, is "An Oldport 
Romance" ; and Colonel Higginson's 
Rhode Island life has left its marks 
on many a page of many a book. He 
must have been a sympathetic guide 
of his English visitors to Whitehall, 
the old Newport home of Bishop 
Berkeley ; for, strong idealist that he 
is, Rhode Island's associations with 
that supreme idealist must have been 
peculiarly dear to him. "There has 
belonged to Rhode Islanders," he 
notes with relish in his little romance, 
"The Monarch of Dreams," "ever 
since the days of Roger \^^illianls. a 
certain taste for the ideal side of ex- 
istence. It is the only state in the 
American Union where chief justices 
habitually write poetry and prosper- 
ous manufacturers print essays on the 
Freedom of the Will." It is a word 
such as we can imagine Dr. Hale also 
saying as he discourses to some visit- 
or at Matunuck, his Rhode Island 
summer home. Colonel Higginson's 
own idealism, in Rhode Island or in 
Cambridge, has always been an ideal- 
ism with hands and feet, like that of 
his Puritan ancestors. He is alwavs 



<^ 



THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. 



the man of affairs as much as the man 
of letters ; and his paper on the Pub- 
lic Schools of Newport, which we find 
in an old volume of "Contributions to 
the History of the Public School Sys- 
tem of Rhode Island," is but one of 
many witnesses to his faithfulness in 
Newport to his duties as a citizen. 



The scene of "A Moon,^lade/' the 
closing' sketch in the little volume, 
"The Procession of the Flowers," is 
laid at Newport. The other essays 
in that charming collection were writ- 
ten at Worcester, and Lake Ouinsiga- 
mond gets into most of them. Their 
very titles — "April Days," "My Out- 
door Study," "Water LiHes," "The 
Life of Birds" — show that they prop- 
erly belong among the "Outdoor 
Papers" ; and in the volume so entitled 
they finally found place. This volume 
is the best expression of Colonel Hig- 
ginson as an outdoor man ; for, like 
Lowell, he has always b,een emphat- 
ically that, a man of the fields and 
woods as much as a man of the library. 
He is the most red-blooded and rural 
of scholars, loving birds quite as well 
as books, and carrying the instinct 
and talent of the naturalist into the 
garden and on to the hills as truly as 
the love and sympathy of the poet. 



Yet it is upon human themes, upon 
literature and history and society, that 
Colonel Higginson has chiefiy v.'rit- 
ten, and the life of a social and polit- 
ical reformer that has been his central 
life. His "Cheerful Yesterdays" are 
almost altogether a reformer's yester- 
days; and his "Contemporaries" were 
almost altogether men and women 
living the most strenuous of strenuous 
lives, devoted to what one of our econ- 
omists has called "the foolish attempt 
to make the world over." In his dis- 
tinctly literary books, like "Atlantic 
Essays" and "The New World and 
the New Book," it is when he comes 
closest to contemporaneity and life 
that he is usually most interesting. 
But this is bv no means alwavs the 



case ; and it is not to be said at all 
without saying at once and warmly 
that upon distinctly literary themes 
and as a representative of literary art 
Colonel Higginson stands in the very 
front American rank. No American 
essays, save Emerson's and Lowell's 
alone, are of higher importance or 
greater charm than his ; and his best 
essays are entitled to rank with 
Lowell's own. He has been a con- 
stant force for culture. He has been 
a constant rebuke to literary slip- 
shodness by his constant regard, 
through the great mass of his work, 
for simplicity, freshness, structure, the 
choice of words, and thoroughness, — 
to emphasize the literary qualities 
which he emphasizes and which he has 
so well exemplified. We think of few 
chapters of advice which the young 
writer could read more profitably 
than Colonel Higginson's "Letter to 
a Young Contributor." He stands 
for devotion to the world's great 
books. He is too good a scholar not 
to know that the best national liter- 
ature must come with love and under- 
standing of the best world literature 
and recognition of its canons and its 
inspirations. 

But for a true, free national liter- 
ature, for a sturdy and independent 
Americanism, he always speaks, — 
there is through all his books no note 
more constant. He hates the colonial- 
ism, the dependence upon English im- 
pulse and imprimatur, which has so 
largely marked our literature up to 
the very present. This is. in one way 
or another, the burden of almost the 
whole of "The New World and the 
New Book." Under the title of "The 
Evolution of an American" he traces 
with enthusiasm the steps by which 
Motley, beginning his intellectual life 
with aristocratic and European senti- 
ments, was made "not merely a pa- 
triot, but a man of democratic con- 
victions at last." Many a page in this 
vital American book might well have 
found its point of departure in 
Lowell's famous essay on "A Certain 
Condescension in Foreigners." In 
the essav entitled "Unnecessarv 



THOMAS IVllXTirORTII IIICGINSON. 



Apologies'" is this fine and true pas- 
sage: 

"Let us make the great effort of sup- 
posing Emerson an English author and 
Matthew Arnold an American; does any 
one suppose that Arnold's criticisms on 
Emerson would in that case have attracted 
very serious attention in either country? 
Had Mr. Gosse been a New Yorker, writ- 
ing in a London magazine, would any one 
on either side of the Atlantic have seri- 
ously cared whether Mr. Gosse thought 
that contemporary England had produced 
a poet? The reasons why the criticisms of 
these two Englishmen have attracted such 
widespread notice among us is that they 
have the accumulated literary weight — the 
ex oriente lux — of London behind them. 
We accept them meekly and almost rever- 
ently; just as we even accept the criticisms 
made on Grant and Sheridan by Lord 
Wolseley, who is, compared to either of 
these generals, but a carpet knight. It is 
in some such way that we must explain 
the meek gratitude with which our press 
receives it, when Mr. Bryce apologizes for 
our deficiencies in the way of literature. 
Mr. Bryce has a chapter on 'Creative Intel- 
lectual Power,' in which he has some capital 
remarks on the impossibility of saying why 
great men appear in one time or place and 
not in another — in Florence, for instance, 
and not in Naples or Milan. Then he goes 
on to say that there is 'no reason why the 
absence of brilliant genius among the sixty 
millions in the United States should excite 
any surprise,' and adds soon after, 'It is 
not to be made a reproach against America 
that men like Tennyson or Darwin have 
not been born there.' Surely not; nor is it 
a reproach against England that men like 
Emerson or Hawthorne have not been 
born there. But if this last is true, why 
did it not occur to Mr. Bryce to say it; and 
had he said it, is it not plain that the whole 
tone and statement of his proposition 
would have been different? It is too earl}' 
for comparison, but it is undoubtedly the 
belief of many Americans — at any rate, it is 
one which I venture to entertain — that the 
place in the history of intellect held a hun- 
dred years hence by the two Americans he 
forgets to mention will be greater than that 
of the two Englishmen he names." 

The point of this is undeniable. 
Mr. Higg-inson tells us more than 
once that in several representative 
English circles he found Francis 
Parkman an unknown name. A lit- 
erary or social judgment of his own 
upon an English matter of moment 
would very likely attract no attention 
whatever in London or Oxford ; 



while Boston and New York listen 
with humble deference to men like 
Mr. Gosse. Yet what enlightened 
man, American or Englishman, can 
fail to see that Colonel Higginson's 
judgment upon any matter, as com- 
pared with that of Mr. Gosse, is not 
simply as "thirteen to twelve" — to 
echo old John Higginson's figure — 
but as thirteen to one? 



Colonel Higginson's writing is im- 
bued throughout with Americanism 
and democracy of the worthiest and 
truest type, and imbued always with 
a splendid enthusiasm. "It is melan- 
choly," he says, "to see young men 
come forth from the college walls with 
less enthusiasm than they carried in, 
— trained in a spirit which is in this 
respect worse than English Toryism, 
that it does not even retain a hearty 
faith in the past. It is better that a 
man should have eyes in the back of 
his head than that he should be 
taught to sneer at even a retrospective 
vision. One may believe that the 
golden age is behind us or before us ; 
but alas for the forlorn wisdom of him 
who rejects it altogether! Better a 
thousand times train a boy on Scott's 
novels or the Border Ballads than ed- 
ucate him to believe on the one side 
that chivalry was a cheat and the 
troubadours imbeciles, and on the 
other hand that universal suffrage is 
an absurdity, and the one real thing 
is to get rid of our voters." He notes 
how often the scholars are behind the 
common people. "Slavery had to be 
abolished before the most accom- 
plished orator of the nation could be 
invited to address the graduates of his 
own university. The first among 
American scholars was nominated 
year after year, only to be rejected, be- 
fore the academic societies of his own 
neighborhood. Yet during all that 
time the rural lecture associations 
showered their invitations on Parker 
and Phillips. Culture shunned them, 
but the common people heard them 
gladly." As to our American lit- 
erature, his own eyes have always 



10 



THOMAS IVENTWORTH iHIGGINSON. 



been in the front of his head, hope- 
fully and confidently looking forward. 
A generation ago he wrote: "Every 
form of human life is romantic ; every 
age may become classic. Lamenta- 
tions, doubts, discouragements, all 
are wasted things. Everything is 
here, between these Atlantic and Pa- 
cific shores, save only the perfected 
utterance that comes with years. Be- 
tween Shakespeare in his cradle and 
Shakespeare in 'Hamlet' there was 
needed but an interval of time ; and 
the same sublime condition is all that 
lies between the America of toil and 
the America of art." "It is but a few 
years," he says again, writing thirty 
years ago, "since we have dared to be 
American in even the details and ac- 
cessories of our literarv work ; to 
make our allusions to natural objects 
real, not conventional ; to ignore the 
nightingale and skylark, and look for 
the classic and romantic on our own 
soil. This change began mainlv with 
Emerson." 

Colonel Higginson is conspicu- 
ously a lover of England. He is never 
happier than in his London reminis- 
cences, of which we have delightful 
chapters both in "Cheerful Yester- 
days" and "Contemporaries." "We 
cannot spare the Englishman from 
our blood ; but it is our business to 
make him more than an Englishman." 
He is a true child of the Puritan, and 
believes that the spirit which founded 
New England is the best possible 
foundation for the better things for 
which we hope in literature and in 
life. "Of course the forest pioneer 
cannot compose orchestral sym- 
phonies, nor the founders of a 
state carve statues. But the thought- 
ful and scholarly men who created 
the Massachusetts Colony brought 
with them the traditions of their 
universities, and left these em- 
bodied in a college. The Puritan life 
was only historically inconsistent 
with culture ; there was no logical an- 
tagonism." As a literarv man he is 
a defender of Puritanism, because 
what he wishes to see breathe through 
all our literature is "the invigorating 



air of great moral principles." He 
says: "As the foundation of all true 
greatness is in the conscience, so we 
are safe if we can but carry into sci- 
ence and art the same earnestness of 
spirit which has fought through the 
great civil war and slain slavery. As 
'the Puritan triumphed' in this stern 
contest, so must the Puritan triumph 
in the more graceful emulations that 
are to come ; but it must be the Puri- 
tanism of Milton, not of Cromwell 
only." 



A Milton in his own way, in his 
equal love of beauty and passion for 
freedom and justice. Colonel Higgin- 
son himself is ; as in his own way he 
is a Sidney too. Was it not Sidney 
who said, or to whom it was said, 
"Whenever you hear of a good war, 
go to it?" Whenever Colonel Hig- 
ginson has heard of a good war, he 
has gone to it ; and the campaigns 
for freedom, equality and progress, in 
the various fields of American life, in 
these two generations, in which he 
has not been one of the first to volun- 
teer, without counting the company 
or the cost, have been few indeed. i 
He led a regiment of negroes in the 
civil war ; he has stood in the front 
rank of many a regiment in many a 
war before and since. He has 
been eminently a knightly and 
chivalric man. He has been, in the 
highest and best sense of the word, 
a romantic one. He has been his 
whole life long the conspicuous friend I 
and champion of woman. No other i 
man has written so constantly, so ' 
variedly, so attractively or so co- 
gently in behalf of the emancipation of 
woman from the legal and industrial 
disabilities by wdiich she has been 
hampered and her elevation to every 
educational and political privilege. 
He has been in this reform our John 
Stuart Mill. He tells us how, very 
early in life, he became impressed by 
the absurdity of the denial of political 
rights to women ; and he signed the 
call for the first national convention 
to promote the woman's rights move- 



THOMAS ll'IlXTU'ORTtI llli.ClXSOK 



It 



mcnr, in 1850. "Of all the move- 
ments in which I ever took part," he 
wrote two years ago, "except the anti- 
slavery agitation, this seems to me the 
most important; nor have I ever wa- 
vered in the opinion announced by 
W'endell Phillips, that it is 'the grand- 
est reform yet launched upon the cen- 
tury, as involving the freedom of one- 
half the human race.' " His "Com- 
mon Sense about Women" is the best 
single book in existence upon 
woman's rights. There is no phase 
of the question which is not some- 
how treated, and the" treatment is al- 
ways pithy, pointed, sane and influ- 
ential, calculated to win the reader 
and not repel him. A typical argument 
is this, replying to the foolish but very 
frequent contention that government 
ultimately rests on force and that 
women must not vote because they 
cannot fight: 

"Tlie truth is that, in this age, it is the 
civilian who rules on the throne or behind 
it. and who makes the fighting men his 
mere agents. Yonder policeman ai the 
corner looks big and formidable: he pro- 
tects the women, and overawes the boys. 
But awaj' in some corner of the City Hall, 
there is some quiet man, out of uniform, 
perhaps a consumptive or a dyspeptic or a 
cripple, who can overawe the burliest po- 
liceman by his authority as city marshal or 
as mayor. So an army is but a larger po- 
lice: and its official head is that plain man 
at the White House, who makes or un- 
makes not merely brevet-brigadiers, but 
major-generals in command, — who can by 
the stroke of the pen convert the most 
powerful man of the army into the most 
powerless. Take away the occupant of the 
position, and put in a woman, and will 
she become impotent because her name is 
Elizabeth or Maria Theresa? It is brains 
that more and more govern the world; 
and whether those brains be on the throne, 
or at the ballot-box, they will soon make 
the owner's sex a subordinate affair. War 
is the last appeal, and happily in these days 
the rarest appeal, of statesmanship. In the 
multifarious other duties that make up 
statesmanship, we cannot spare the brains, 
the self-devotion and the enthusiasm ' of 
woman. There is nothing impotent in the 
statesmanship of women when they are ad- 
mitted to exercise it; they are only power- 
less for good when they are obliged to ob- 
tain by wheedling and flattery a sway that 
should be recognized, responsible and 
limited." 



Thirty years ago, at the close of the 
civil war, Colonel Higginson seemed 
a little appalled lest there might be 
no important cause left to fight for 
except that of woman's rights. Be- 
ing himself, by nature and by grace, a 
fighter, having proved in his own life 
the immense good that comes to a 
man, as Whittier used to put it, from 
identifying himself early with a good 
and unpopular cause, he had consid- 
erable anxiety about the moral muscle 
of the rising generation. He said 
then: 

"As one looks forward to the America of 
fifty years hence, the main source of 
anxiety appears to be in a probable excess 
of prosperity, and in the want of a good 
grievance. We seem nearly at the end of 
those great public wrongs which require a 
special moral earthquake to end them. 
There will be social and religious changes, 
perhaps great ones; but there are no omens 
of any very fierce upheaval. And seeing the 
educational value to this generation of the 
reforms for which it has contended, and 
especially of the antislavery enterprise, one 
must feel an impulse of pity for our suc- 
cessors, who seem likely to have no con- 
victions for which they can honestly be 
mobbed. Can we spare these great tonics? 
It is the experience of history that all re- 
ligious bodies are purified by persecution, 
and materialized by neace. No amount of 
hereditary virtue has thus far saved the 
merely devout communities from deterior- 
ating, when let alone, into comfort and 
good dinners." 

The course of events in these thirty 
years has shown that Colonel Hig- 
ginson had no reason for anxiety on 
this particular score. He noted him- 
self, some years later, in discussing the 
importance of great moral causes as 
a literary tonic, that Helen Hunt 
Jackson was as thoroughly thrilled 
and inspired by the wrongs of the 
American Indians as was Mrs. Stowe 
by those of the negroes. He also 
quickly saw, as Phillips saw, that the 
great social and industrial questions 
which were looming above the ho- 
rizon would make their imperative 
call upon radical and heroic men, and 
furnish all the moral gymnasium nec- 
essary for a long time to come for 
men in dangfer of a life of "comfort 



v<* 



12 



THOMAS IVENTIVORTH HIGGINSON. 



and good dinners." His own voice 
has rung as true and strong upon the 
issues of the new social revolution as 
it rang in the old conflict with slavery. 
As he saw that woman was in the due 
course of things to have her oppor- 
tunity and rights, so he has seen that 
the poor man was to have his. 
Among his poems we think of none 
more stirring than that, fittingly in- 
scribed to Edward Bellamy, entitled 
"Heirs of Time": 

"From street and square, from hill and glen 
Of this vast world beyond my door, 
I hear the tread of marching men, 
The patient armies of the poor. 

The halo of the city's lamps 

Hangs, a vast torchlight, in the air; 

I watch it through the evening damps: 
The masters of the world are there. 

Not ermine-clad or clothed in state. 
Their title-deeds not yet made plain; 

But waking early, toiling late, 
The heirs of all the earth remain. 

Some day, by laws as fixed and fair 
As guide the planets in their sweep, 

The children of each outcast heir 
The harvest-fruits of time shall reap. 

The peasant brain shall yet be wise. 
The untamed pulse grow calm and still: 

The blind shall see, the lowly rise. 

And work in peace Time's wondrous 
will. 

Some day, without a trumpet's call. 

This news will o'er the world be blown: 

"The heritage comes back to all! 
The myriad monarchs take their own!' ". 

Into the cause of pure civil service, 
into the cause of the education and 
the political rights of the freedmen in 
the South, into the cause of interna- 
tionalism, into every cause which in 
the generation since the war has 
called for courageous championship. 
Colonel Higginson has thrown him- 
self with the same enthusiasm with 
which he came to the side of Garrison 
and Phillips and Parker. No rebukes 
have been nobler than his of the mil- 
itarism and materialism which have 
menaced the republic in the year that 
has passed. 'His word at the dinner 
of the American Historical Associa- 
tion was but one of many in which in 
this time he has reminded America 



of her duty to herself and to the cause 
of freedom in the world. No v.-ord 
read at the great Faneuil Hall meet- 
ing a few nights ago, called to express 
the sympathy of Boston with the 
Boers, was more emphatic or impress- 
ive than his: "Every step in the de- 
mands of the English government 
upon the Transvaal has implied claims 
such as would be resisted by unan- 
imous voice in every nation of the 
civilized world. Surely we have a 
right to meet in Faneuil Hall to pro- 
test against such injustice and to do 
honor to the courage unsurpassed 
since Leonidas and his three hundred 
Spartans 'spent one day in dying' in 
the pass of Thermopylae." If Colonel 
Higginson lives to be a hundred, he 
will never hear the bugle blown in 
behalf of any cause of freedom v/ith- 
out becoming young again and giv- 
ing to the cause the reinforcement of 
his energetic word. 



It is in Colonel Higginson's poems 
that we often have the most stirring 
expression of his love of freedom and 
his prophetic confidence in a future 
greater and nobler than any cele- 
brated past. One of the finest of his 
sonnets is that to Whittier, v/iih its 
grateful confession that it was the 
poet's voice which gave him his own 
peculiar call to duty: 

"At dawn of manhood came a voice to me 
That said to startled conscience, 'Sleep no 

more!' 
Like some loud cry that peals from door 

to door 
It roused a generation; and I see, 
Now looking back through years of mem- 
ory. 
That all of school or college, all the lore 
Of worldly maxims, all the statesman's 

store, 
Were nought beside that voice's mastery. 
If any good to me or from me came 
Through life, and if no influence less 

divine 
Has quite usurped the place of duty's 

flame ; 
If aught rose worthy in this heart of mine, 
Aught that, viewed backward, wears no 

shade of shame, — 
Bless thee, old friend! for that high call 

was thine." 



THOMAS WENTWORTH HICCINSON. 



1 7 



Significant, too, and for the Boston 
man inspiring, are the Unes upon 
Boston in the Memorial Ode read be- 
fore the Grand Army Posts of Boston 
in 1881: 

"Not in the past, but in the future, we 
Must seek the mastery 
Of fate and fortune, thought and word 

and deed. 
Gone, gone for aye, the little Puritan 

homes; 
Gone the beleaguered town, from out 

whose spires 
Flashed forth the warning fires 
Telling the Cambridge rustics, 'Percy 

comes!' 
And gone those later days of grief and 

shame 
When slavery changed our court-house to 

a jail, 
And blood-drops stained its threshold. 

Now we hail. 
After the long afifray, 
A time of calmer order, wider aim, 
More mingled races, manhood's larger 

frame, 
A city's broader sweep, the Boston of 

to-day. 

They say our city's star begins to wane. 
Our heroes pass away, our poets die. 
Our passionate ardors mount no more so 

high. 
'Tis but an old alarm, the affright of 

wealth, 
The cowardice of culture, wasted pain! 

Freedom is hope and health! 
The sea on which yon ocean steamers ride 
Is the same sea that rocked the shallops 

frail 
Of the bold Pilgrims; yonder is its tide. 
And here are we, their sons; it grows not 

pale. 
Nor we who walk its borders. Never 

fear! 
Courage and truth are all! 
Trust in the great hereafter, and whene'er 
In some high hour of need, 
That tests the heroic breed, 
The Boston of the future sounds its call, 
Bartletts and Lowells yet shall answer, 

'Here!'" 

With such a faith in the future of 
the Puritan city, he has also been its 
stanch defender from ignorant and 
unjust criticism. In his essay on 
"Literary Tonics" there is no passage 
more interesting than this about 
Boston: 

"Some minor English critic wrote lately 
of Dr. Holmes's 'Life of Emerson': 'The 
Boston of his day does not seem to have 



been a very strong place; we lack pcrlorm- 
ance.' The Boston of which he speaks was 
the Boston of Garrison and Phillips, of Whit- 
tier and Theodore Parker; it was the head- 
quarters of those old-time abolitionists of 
whom the English Earl of Carlisle wrote 
that they were 'fighiing a battle without 
a parallel in the history of ancient or mod- 
ern heroism.' It was also the place which 
nurtured those young Harvard students 
who are chronicled in the "Harvard Memo- 
rial Biographies' — those who fell in the war 
of the Rebellion; those of whom Lord 
Houghton once wrote tersely to me: 
'They are men whom Europe has learned 
to honor and would do well to imitate.' 
The service of all these men, and its results, 
give a measure of the tonic afiforded in the 
Boston of that day. Nay, Emerson him- 
self was directly responsible for much of 
their strength. "To him more than to all 
other causes together,' says Lowell, "did 
the young martyrs of our Civil War owe 
the sustaining strength of moral heroism 
that is so touching in every record of their 
lives.' And when the force thus developed 
in Boston and elsewhere came to do its 
perfect work, that work turned out to be 
the lighting of a gigantic war and the free- 
ing of four millions of slaves; and this in 
the teeth of every sympathy and desire of 
all that appeared inffuential in England. 
This is what is meant, in American history 
at least, by "performance.' " 

This was the Boston which was the 
capital of the movement which 
purged the land of slavery, as it was 
the capital of the movement which 
gave us our independence. It was 
the great centre of the activities 
of most of the men and women 
named in Colonel Higginson's 
"Contemporaries." Emerson, Al- 
cott, Parker, Whittier, Lydia Maria 
Child, Dr. Howe, Garrison, Phillips 
and Sumner are the heroes of 
the great era of reform to whom spe- 
cial essays are devoted in this latest 
volume ; and there are also essays 
upon Walt Whitman, Sidney Lanier. 
Helen Hunt, John Holmes, Thaddeus 
William Harris and General Grant. 
"An Evening with i\irs. Hawthorne" 
tells of a conversation devoted mainly 
to the birth-hour of the "Scarlet Let- 
ter." "A Visit to John Brown's 
Household in 1859," contributed 
originally to Redpath's "Life of John 
Brown," is the story of an evening 
spent with the family at North Elba 
while the old hero lav in the Virginia 



14 



THOMAS IVENTIVOKTH JIIUGIXSON. 



jail awaiting- execution. In all lit- 
erature we know of no stronger or 
tenderer picture of homely heroism 
and absolute devotion. "It had been 
my privilege," \vrote Higginson, "to 
live in the best society all my life — 
namely, that of abolitionists and fugi- 
tive slaves. I had seen the most emi- 
nent persons of the age — several men 
on whose heads tens of thousands of 
dollars had been set. ... I had 
known these, and such as these ; but 
I had not known the Browns. 
Nothing short of knowing them can 
be called a liberal education." He 
prophesied then that John Brown 
would become "the favorite hero of 
all American romance" ; and he said 
this memorable word of his old-fash- 
ioned Puritanism: "John Brown is al- 
most the only radical abolitionist I 
have ever known who was not more 
or less radical in religious matters 
also. His theology was Puritan, like 
his practice ; and accustomed as we 
now are to see Puritan doctrines and 
Puritan virtues separately exhibited, 
it seems quite strange to behold them 
combined in one person again." 

The essays in "Contemporaries" 
differ in interest and value. Garrison 
is warmly recognized as "the living 
centre" of the group of reformers ; 
but the essay upon him is not one of 
the most important. That upon 
Phillips is much better, and the fine 
description and analysis of Phillips's 
oratory which it contains is alone suf- 
ficient to give it permanent value. 
The following word is a fine 
tribute to Phillips's fine fearlessness 
at the time when in the autumr. and 
wmter of i860 he was speaking at 
xHusic Hall to Theodore Parker's 
congregation, and was each Sunday 
followed home by a mob, while his 
house was guarded through the 
n ghts by friends and the police: 
"During all this time there was some- 
thing peculiarly striking and char- 
acteristic in his demeanor. There was 
absolutely nothing of bulldog com- 
bativeness. but a careless, buoyant, al- 
most patrician air, as if nothing in the 
wav of mob violence were worth 



considering, and all threats of oppo- 
nents were simply beneath contempt. 
He seemed like some English Jacob- 
ite nobleman on the scatifold, care- 
lessly taking snufif and kissing his 
hand to the crowd before laying his 
head upon the block." It seems to us 
that Colonel Higginson does not do 
quite sufficient justice to Phillips's 
last days. He may have made mis- 
takes, — he doubtless did, — in his dis- 
cussions of capital and labor and of 
the currency ; but the significant 
thing is that he recognized so much 
more clearly than most of the old re- 
formers where the next battlefield 
with slavery lay, and that he threw 
himself into the fight on the right 
side. The finest passage in the essav 
on Sumner is that where, writing of 
the day before Sumner's funeral, Hig- 
ginson's thoug"ht goes back to the be- 
ginning of Sumner's chivalrous 
career and he traces the changes that 
had come to Boston in the intervening 
years : 

"Standing amid that crowd at the State 
House, it was impossible not to ask one's 
self: 'Can this be Boston? The city whose 
bells toll for Sumner — is it the same city 
that fired one hundred guns for the passage 
of the Fugitive Slave Law? The King's 
Chapel, which is to hold his funeral rites 
— can it be the same King's Chapel which 
furnished from among its worshippers the 
only Massachusetts representative who 
voted for that law? These black soldiers 
who guard the cof^n of their great friend — 
are they of the same race with those un- 
armed black men who were marched down 
yonder street surrounded by the bayonets 
of Boston militiamen?' It is said that when 
Sumner made his first conspicuous ap- 
pearance as an orator in Boston, and de- 
livered his address on 'The True Grandeur 
of Nations,' a prominent merchant said in- 
dignantly, as lie went out of the building: 
'Well, if that young man is going to talk 
in that way, we cannot expect Boston to 
hold him up.' Boston did not hold him 
up; but l\Tassachusetts so sustained him 
that he held up Boston, until it had learned 
to sustain him in return." 

Far finer and more considerable 
than any of these essays is that upon 
Theodore Parker. There is not, in 
all the books in the library, a nobler 
tribute to Parker than this, none 
which expounds more adequately his 



THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. 



15 



marvellous learning, his great achieve- 
ments and the sources of his power. 

"Parker lived his life much as he walked 
the streets of Boston, — not quite gracefully, 
nor yet statelily, but with quick, strong, 
solid step, with sagacious eyes wide open, 
thrusting his broad shoulders a little for- 
ward, as if butting away the throng cf 
evil deeds around him, and scattering 
whole atmospheres of unwholesome cloud. 
Wherever he went, there went a glance of 
sleepless vigilance, an unforgetting mem- 
ory, a tongue that never faltered, and an 
arm that never quailed." 

The essay upon Lydia Maria Child 
is one of the best in the volume, a 
most impressive account of that great 
woman's varied and remarkable 
achievements. To her famous "Ap- 
peal for that Class of Americans 
called Africans," published in 1833, 
Higginson pays this high tribute: 
"As it was the first antislavery work 
ever printed in America in book form, 
so I have always thought it the 
ablest ; that is, it covered the whole 
ground better than any other." Even 
more interesting is the essay upon 
Helen Jackson, whose friend Colonel 
Higginson was from the very begin- 
ning of her literary career, and who 
clearly found his friendship one of the 
most formative and stimulating influ- 
ences of her life. There is no chapter 
in the book more personal, vital or 
vivacious. 



Higginson somewhere discusses, 
we think ironically, somebody's 
dictum that "a foreign nation is a kind 
of contemporaneous posterity." What- 
ever truth or falsehood may be in that 
w^ord, this we think is true, — that in- 
sight discounts history and does not 
have to wait for the verdict of pos- 
terity. Of insight only is this true. 
The man of fashion and the fool have 
no instinct that can tell where God 
is on the field in their own place and 
time. To the conventional man of 
Boston and of the nation, the period 
of the great heroes of these glowing 
pages was "a time when truth was 
called treason." How quickly was 
the conventional verdict set aside! 



'Tt is a striking fact," Higginson 
notes at the close of his essay on Gar- 
rison, "that in the valhalla of con- 
temporary statues in his own city, 
only two, those of Webster and Ev- 
erett, commemorate those who stood 
for the party of conservatism in the 
great antislavery conflict ; while all 
the rest, Lincoln, Quincy, Sumner, 
Andrew, Mann, Garrison and Shaw, 
represent the party of attack. It is 
the verdict of time, confirming in 
bronze and marble the great words 
of Emerson, 'What forests of laurel' 
we bring, and the tears of mankind, 
to those who stood firm against the 
opinion of their contemporaries!' " 
But to the eye of Emerson himself 
his contemporaries were as the im- 
mortals. To him history and the 
newspaper were one ; and he knew 
John Brown for a hero while the 
musketry yet rattled at Harper's 
Ferry as truly as the men of Concord 
Bridge whose shot had been heard 
round the world and been ap- 
plauded all along the line. To Hig- 
ginson also the men with whom he 
labored in the cause of freedom were 
the same men and held the same rank 
when they were contemporaries as 
now when they are memories and 
their statues stand in the streets. 

In the great group of American 
fighters for freedom, Colonel Higgin- 
son will hold an immortal place. 
Gladstone at Oxford in his later life 
reviewed the changes through which 
he had passed since he began his pub- 
lic career as "the rising hope of the 
stern and unbending Tories," and 
said: "I have come to place a higher 
and ever higher value upon human 
liberty, and there, and there only, is 
the secret of the change." With 
Colonel Higginson there has been no 
change. His whole life is one great 
sermon on freedom. He began his 
public career as its champion, his 
long years have all been spent in its 
service, and so long as he is with us, 
and when his presence is withdrawn, 
his word will still be heard charging 
the republic never to give that sacred 
and commanding word a second place. 



THOMAS WENTWORTHi 
HIGGINSON. 






Cheerful Vesterdays, i voi, i2mo, giittop, $2.00. 

A Cambridge Boyhood ; A Child of the College ; The Period of 
the Newness; The Rearing of a Reformer; The Fugitive Slave 
Epoch ; The Birth of a Literature ; Kansas and John Brown ; Civil 
War ; Literary London Twenty Years Ago ; Literary Paris Twenty 
Years Ago ; On the Outskirts of Public Life ; Epilogue. 

"Mr. Higginson never wrote more agreeably than here, with 
happier expression, with more wealth of humorous and effective 
illustration, with more of that allusive light which comes from a 
wide range of culture, and a memory that instinctively reproduces 
at the right moment the appropriate anecdote or phrase." — IV^zv 
York Evening Post. 

Contemporaries, 1 voi, i2mo, $2.00. 

The subjects treated in this interesting volume are : Emerson, 
Alcott, Theodore Parker, Whittier, Whitman, Lanier, An Evening 
with Mrs. Hawthorne, Mrs. Child, Helen Jackson (" H. H."), John 
Holmes, Dr. Thaddeus W. Harris, A Visit to John Brown's House- 
hold, Garrison, Phillips, Sumner, Dr. S. G. Howe, Dr. Howe's 
Anti-Slavery Career, Ulysses S. Grant, The Eccentricities of Re- 
formers, The Road to England. 

Few living American writers have known so many notable 
persons as Mr. Higginson, and of that few none could write so 
freshly, frankly, and generously as he about the most famous of 
those in this book of his — this gallery of veritable contemporary 
portraits. — Mail and Express (New York). 

Other Books by Mr. Higginson 

ATLANTIC ESSAYS Crown 8vo, $1.50 

COMMON SENSE ABOUT WOMEN Crown 8vo, 150 

ARMY LIFE IN A BLACK REGIMENT Crown 8vo, 1.50 

THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW BOOK . . . Crown 8vo, 1.50 

TRAVELLERS AND OUTLAWS . . . . ^-. . . . . Crown 8vo, 1.50 

MALBONE: AN OLDPORT ROMANCE ■ )■ (^. . . • Crown 8vo, 1.50 

OLDPORT DAYS ./", ^ Crown 8vo, 1.50 

OUT-DOOR PAPERS . . . \Ij Crown 8vo, 1.50 

THE PROCESSION OF THEFLOWERS 1.25 

THE AFTERNOON LANDSCAPE. Poems and Translations . . i.oo 

THE MONARCH OF DREAMS _- *v • O Q 9 • • • • ^^mo, .50 

WENDELL PHILLIPS . . . .KD"- • • ■ • 4to paper, .25 

Sold by all BooLscllers. Sent, postpaid, by 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. BOSTON. 



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